[OPE] concentration of economic power

I came across this paper today which might be of interest:

The backbone of complex networks of corporations: Who is controlling whom?
J.B. Glattfelder, S. Battiston
http://www.unifr.ch/econophysics/papers.php?code=0902.0878&year=2009

Some quotes:

"this paper presents the first extensive cross-country investigation
of corporations based on ownership relations and market capitalization
values in 48 national stock markets"

"It has been known for over 75 years that the Anglo-Saxon countries
have the highest occurrence of widely held firms. This statement, that
the control of corporations is dispersed amongst many shareholders,
invokes the intuition that there exists a multitude of owners that
only hold a small amount of shares in a few companies. However, in
contrast to such intuition, our main finding is that a local
dispersion of control is associated with a global concentration of
control and value. This means that only a small elite of shareholders
continually reappears as the controlling entity of all the stocks,
without ever having been previously detected or reported on."

"Finally we observe that the US financial sector holds the seat of
power at an international level."
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Received on Fri Feb 6 12:43:20 2009